A Tramp's Sketches Part 8

He had also brought a kerosene lamp, which, however, lacked a gla.s.s.

He stood it on one of the grey barrels and turned it monstrously high, just to show his largeness of heart, I suppose. I got up and turned it down because it was smoking, and he waved his hand once more deprecatingly, and turning the wick up and down several times, signified that I was to do with it exactly as I pleased. He left it smoking again, however.

I put the thought of a good supper out of my mind and looked at the black bread with some pathos, as who would not after conjuring before the eyes a plate of chicken and a bottle of wine? However, it was indeed _nitchevo_, to use the Russian phrase, a mere nothing. I averred I was not hungry and put the bread in my pack, of which I had made a pillow, and simulating comfort, said I thanked him and would now go to sleep. My host understood me, but was not less original in his parting greeting than in the rest. He shook hands with me effusively, and pointed to the roof.

"One G.o.d," he said. "And two men underneath. Two men, one soul."

He looked at me benevolently and pointed to his heart.

"Two men, one soul," he repeated, and crossed himself. "You understand?"

"I understand."

Then he added finally, "Turn the lamp as high as you like," and suited the action to the word by turning it so high that one saw a dense cloud of smoke beyond the lurid flame.

"Good-night!"

"Good-night!"

My queer guardian angel disappeared. I fastened the door so that it should not swing in the wind, and then climbed back into my wire hammock, stretched out my limbs, laid my cheek on my pack, and slept.

Nothing disturbed me, though I woke in the night, and looking round, missed the Ikon lamp which would have been burning had I been in a home. It was a saint's day. The absence of the Ikon told me the difference between sleeping in a house and sleeping in a home.

Perhaps it was because of this difference that my host blessed me so earnestly.

Next morning I sought my host in vain. He had apparently left the town before dawn with a waggon of produce that had to be carted to Tuapse.

At breakfast in the Turkish coffee-house I looked with some amus.e.m.e.nt at the bread and carrot, discarded the latter, but munched the former to the accompaniment of a plate of chicken and a bottle of wine. My imagining, therefore, of the previous night was not altogether vain.

All that was needed was that my comical host should look in. As it was, in his absence I drank his health with a Georgian.

IV

SOCRATES OF ZUGDIDA

I was travelling without a map, never knowing what I was coming to next, what long Caucasian settlement or rushing unbridged river, and I came quite unexpectedly to a town. I had not the remotest idea that a town was near, and when I learned the name of the town I realised that I had never heard of it before--Zugdida.

This is no fairy story. Zugdida veritably exists, and may be found marked on large maps. I came into it on a Sunday evening, and found it one of the largest and most lively of all the Caucasian towns I had yet visited; the shops and the taverns all open, the wide streets crowded with gaily dressed hors.e.m.e.n, the footways thronged with peasants walking out in Sunday best. A remote town withal, not on the railways, and unvisited as yet by any motor-car--unvisited, because the rivers in these parts are all bridgeless.

I was looking for a place where I might spend the night--towns are inhospitable places, and one is timorous of sleeping in a tavern full of armed drunkards--when I was hailed by a queer old man, who noticed that I was a stranger. He kept one of the two hundred wine-cellars of the town, and was able to give me a good supper and a gla.s.s of wine with it. He was an aged Mingrelian, bald on his crown, but lank-haired, dreamy-eyed, stooping; he had a Robinson Crusoe type of countenance. I had come to one of the oldest inhabitants of Zugdida, an extraordinary character.

I asked him how the town had grown in his memory.

"When I came here from the hills forty years ago," said he, "long before the Russo-Turkish War, there were three houses here--three only, two were wine-cellars. Now Zugdida is second only to Kutais. I remember how two more wine-cellars were built, and a small general shop, then a bread shop, then two more wine--cellars, two little grocer's shops, some farm-houses. We became a fair-sized village, and wondered how we had grown. The Russians came and built stone houses and a military barracks, a prison, a police-station, and a big church; then came the Hotel of Russia, the Universal Stores. We built the broad, flag-stoned market, and named a Fair day; saddlery and sword shops opened, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, coppersmiths, jewel workers, tailors; Singer's sewing machines came, two more hotels, and we grew and grew. We have now over two hundred taverns. We have offered the Government to pay for all the necessary land, and defray all minor expenses, if they will connect us with Poti by railway, and if it were not that so many people want bribes we should be part of Europe. As it is, we're just a bit of the old Caucasus."

He pointed to a group of drunkards, all armed from head to foot, but now clinging to one another and raising their voices in Asiatic chanting.

After supper--a stew of mutton and maize, with a bottle of very sweet rose-coloured wine--the old man took me aside and made me a long harangue on life and death and the hereafter. Better sermon on a Sunday evening I never heard in church. He told me the whole course of the good man's life and compared it with that of the bad man, weighed the two, and found the latter wanting on all counts, adding, however, that it was impossible to be good.

"How did you come to think so seriously of life?" I inquired.

"In this way," he replied. "Once I was very 'flee-by-the-sky'--I didn't care a rap, sinned much, and feared neither G.o.d nor the devil--or, if anything, I feared the devil a little; for G.o.d I never had the least respect. But one day I picked up a book written by one Andrew, and I read some facts that astonished me. He said that in eight thousand years after the creation of the world the sun would go red and the moon grey, the sun would grow old and cease to warm the world--just as you and I must inevitably grow old. In that day would be born together, one in the East and one in the West, Christ and the Anti-Christ, and they would fight for the dominion of the world. This story caused me to pause and think. Hitherto I had taken all for granted.

"It had never occurred to me that the sun might stop shining, that the stars might go out. I had scarcely thought that I myself might stop, might die.

"'What happens to me when I die?' I asked people. 'G.o.d will judge you,' they said. 'If good, you go to heaven; if evil, to h.e.l.l.' That did not satisfy me. How did people know? No one had ever come back to tell us how things were done after death.

"I had never thought at all before, but now I began to think so hard that I could not go about the ordinary things of life, I was so wrapped up in the mystery of my own ignorance.

"People said I was under the evil eye. But that again was nonsense.

'Whence comes man?' I asked. 'Where does he go? Where was I before I was born?' I was part of my ancestors. Very well. 'But where shall I go when I die? What shall I be?'

"I nearly learned to disbelieve in religion. You must know I began to go to church every Sat.u.r.day evening and on all festivals. I listened intently to all the services and the sermons, and I read all that I could find to read, and I asked questions of priests and of educated people--all with the idea of solving this mystery of life. I tried to be good at the bidding of the Church, but I gave that up. I learned that it was impossible to avoid sin.

"You drink wine--this is a sin; give short weight--that is a sin; look on your neighbour's wife--that is a sin; everything you do is sin--even if you do nothing, that is sin; there is no road of sinlessness.

"I went on living as I felt inclined, without care as to whether it were sin or no. But still I asked myself about man's life.

"Some one said to me, 'You will never understand, because you think of yourself as a separate individual, and not as just a little part of the human race. You live on in all the people who come after you, just as before you were born you lived in those who were before you.'

"That was something new, but I understood him, and I asked him a new question: 'If what you say is true--and very likely it is--what, then, is the past of the whole human race, and what its future? What does the life of the human race mean?'

"That he could not answer. Can you answer it? No. No one can answer it."

"You are like Socrates," I said.

"Who was Socrates?"

"He was the man whom the Oracle indicated as the wisest man alive. All men knew nothing, but Socrates was found wiser than they, for he alone knew that he knew nought."

A look of pleased vanity floated over the face of my Mingrelian host.

He was at least quite human.

Before going to bed we drank one another's healths.

V

"HAVE YOU A LIGHT HAND?"

This is not simply a matter of making pastry, as you shall see.

I was tramping along a Black Sea road one night, and was wondering where I should find a shelter, when suddenly a little voice cried out to me from the darkness of the steppe. I stopped and looked and listened. In a minute a little boy in a red shirt and a grey sheepskin hat came careering towards me, and called out: "Do you want a place to sleep? My mother's coffee-house is the best you'll find. The coffee-house down the hill is nothing to it. There it is, that dark house you pa.s.sed. I am out gathering wood for the fire, but I shall come in a minute."